‘Elegantly written… Should be mandatory reading for citizens of Delhi who wish to know their city better—even, or especially, those who do not buy or read books themselves.’—Ramachandra Guha
‘A heady mix of anecdote, analysis and emotion … melt[s] the porous barrier between fiction and ethnography, plunging the reader into a cinematic vortex of history.’—Saikat Majumdar
For decades, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar drew students, collectors, families, tourists and lifelong shauqeen to its pavement piles: textbooks, comics, rare editions, pirated bestsellers, forgotten magazines, discarded libraries, and books that seemed to find their readers by accident. Built by migrant booksellers, sustained by bargain-hunters and bibliophiles, and shaped by the rhythms of the street, the bazaar became one of Delhi’s most beloved cultural institutions.
In The Sunday Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra traces the life of this remarkable market—from its roots in the book cultures of Shahjahanabad and Daryaganj to its rise as a second-hand book paradise, and from its legal battles and evictions to its relocation in Mahila Haat.
Combining urban history, fieldwork, memoir and literary affection, she follows the books, booksellers and readers who made the bazaar a parallel world of print: informal, unpredictable, deeply democratic, and impossible to replace.
At once urban history, ethnography, memoir, and a love letter to second-hand books, The Sunday Book Bazaar asks what makes a market more than a place of commerce. Who gets to read? Who gets to sell? Who gets to occupy public space? And what does a city lose when it tidies away the unruly, democratic spaces where its readers first learn to browse, bargain, linger and belong?